Great Throughts Treasury

"What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality."

"Art is life’s dream interpretation"

"Psychoanalysis arrived to save the human soul in a materialistic era sick with self-consciousness and threatened by loss of belief in immortality and in its public expression, religion. Its greatness resides in having done this in the mind-set of our era, not simply symbolizing the soul exoterically or concretizing it socially as in the past, but attempting to demonstrate it scientifically. But realistic psychology is the death knell of the soul, whose source, nature, and value lie precisely in the abstract, the unfathomable, and the esoteric."

"The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies — one might almost say, two personalities of the individual — are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life — in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man."

"The new meaning of soul is creativity and mysticism. These will become the foundation of the new psychological type and with him or her will come the new civilization."

"Man works primarily for his own self-respect and not for others or for profit. . . the person who is working for the sake of his own satisfaction, the money he gets in return serves merely as fuel, that is, as a symbol of reward and recognition, in the last analysis, of acceptance by one's fellowmen."

"Fathers and Mothers! Honor your children and love them."

"The richer–that is, the more varied and complete–the individual’s emotional life, the less is he driven to projection, and the more will he incline to identification. His outlet and satisfaction comes in identifying himself with the emotions of the other. On the other hand, the narrower and more restricted the individual’s emotional life, the more intense will be his fewer emotions, the less will he be inclined to, and capable of, identification–the lack of which he has to compensate for by projection. Projection thus proves to be a compensatory mechanism that adjusts for an inner lack. Identification, on the other hand, is an expression of abundance, of the desire for union, for alliance, for sharing. "

"We are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison."

"The correct didactic analysis is one that does not in the least differ from the curative treatment. How, indeed, shall the future analyst learn the technique if he does not experience it just exactly as he is to apply it later?"

"This very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual, which underlies the concept of collective religion, and not on a psychological identification with the artist, that the pleasurable effect of the work of art ultimately depends, and the effect is, in this sense, one of deliverance….But both [artist and enjoyer], in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as a high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling. "

"Thou shalt not give birth reluctantly."

"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, for there are plenty of others."

"But this is by no means to be taken metaphorically in any way - not even in the psychological sense. For in the analytic situation the patient repeats, biologically, as it were, the period of pregnancy, and at the conclusion of the analysis — i. e., the re-separation from the substitute object — he repeats his own birth for the most part quite faithfully in all its details. The analysis finally turns out to be a belated accomplishment of the incompleted mastery of the birth trauma."

"This can express itself in the child's manifold ways and peculiarities (always asking questions), proving that it seeks in itself for the lost memory of its earlier place of abode, which, in consequence of an extremely intense repression, it cannot find."

"n the religious myths, the creative will appears personified in God, and man already feels himself guilty when he assumes himself to be like God, that is, to ascribe this will to himself. In the heroic myths on the contrary, man appears as himself, creative and guilt for his suffering and fall is ascribed to God, that is, to his own will. Both are only extreme reaction phenomena of man wavering between his Godlikeness and his nothingness, whose will is awakened to the knowledge of its power and whose consciousness is aroused to terror before it."

"The whole sequence of evolution seems somehow to correspond to continued births, rebirths, and new births. "

"In attempting to reconstruct for the first time from analytic experiences the to all appearances purely physical birth trauma with its prodigious psychical consequences for the whole development of mankind, we are led to recognize in the birth trauma the ultimate biological basis of the psychical."

"And one actually has the impression, from very many purely organic sufferings, that they save the individual — if one may so express it — from the luxury of a neurosis formation. But it would be more correct to say that the neurosis is a more pretentious substitute for a banal organic suffering. One is not frequently astonished to see how it is precisely a neurosis, with its 'counterfeit' physical symptoms, that prevents the development of any real disease of the same organ, just because it is a substitute for it."

"The manic stage frequently following the depressive is physically distinguished, on the other hand, by the post-natal liveliness and movement, whilst the feeling of extreme happiness and blessedness conforms to the pre-natal libido gratification."

"Further, all neurotic disturbances in breathing (asthma), which repeat the feeling of suffocation, relate directly to the physical reproductions of the birth trauma. The extensive use of the neurotic headache (migraine) goes back to the specially painful part allotted to the head in parturition."

"As we recognized in the neurotic a human being who cannot, without harm, overcome the primal affect of anxiety arising in the birth trauma, so the hero represents the type who, being free from anxiety, seeks to overcome an apparently specially severe birth trauma by a compensatory repetition of it in his deeds."

"As the analysis of childish phobias has clearly shown, the size or fatness (circumference of the body) of the animals causing fear refers to the state of pregnancy of which the child, as we can show, has more than a vague memory."

"We believe we have shown, in a bird's-eye view of the essential achievements and developments of civilization, that not only all socially valuable, even over-valued, creations of man but even the fact of becoming man, arise from a specific reaction to the birth trauma, and, finally, that recognition of this through the psychoanalytic method is due to the most complete removal as yet achieved of the primal repression, through the overcoming of the primal resistance, anxiety."

"Breuer's starting-point was "the fundamental fact that the symptoms of hysterical patients depend on impressive but forgotten scenes of their life (traumata), the therapy based on it causing them to remember and to reproduce these experiences under hypnosis (catharsis), and the consequent fragment of theory, that these symptoms correspond to an abnormal use of undischarged quantities of excitation (conversion).""

"What lies in between is the psychology of the Unconscious created by Freud alone, namely, the first psychology which at all deserves this independent name, since the academic psychology originating from philosophical speculation gradually encroached more and more on to medical ground (philosophy of the senses, neurology, anatomy of the brain.)"

"On the other hand, analytic experience shows that something must exist which makes it possible to an extensive degree to free highly neurotic human beings from the excessive dominance of their Unconscious and put them in a position to live as those do who are not neurotic."

"Thus it is a matter of allowing the patient, who in his neurosis has fled back to the mother fixation, to repeat and to understand the birth trauma and its solution during the analysis in the transference, without allowing him the unconscious reproduction of the same in the severance from the therapist."

"All this results by means of the technique of association and of interpretation, developed by Freud, whereby we use our own Unconscious as the main way leading to the patient's Unconscious. This is the only means by which we can operate on his libido."

"Though consciousness is but a feeble weapon, it is the only one accessible to us in the fight against neurosis."

"This is shown from the analysis of the mania to invent, which Kielholz has attempted in an interesting work. In some of his cases it is obvious that the patient who wishes to discover perpetuum mobile or squaring of the circle wants in this way to solve the problem of permanently dwelling in and fitting into the mother's womb. In other cases of electrical inventions (apparatus though which run warm unseen currents), etc., a detailed study of the patients' delusions ought to show clearly their importance as a reaction to the birth trauma."

"When analytically adjusted psychiatrists have recognized that the content of the psychosis is "cosmologic," we need not avoid the next step, that of analysis of cosmology itself, for then we shall find that it is nothing other than the infantile recollection of one's own birth projected on to Nature."

"But in reality, as opposed to phantasy, in dream formation there occur during analysis many definite but quite unconscious reminiscences or reproductions of the individual intrauterine posture, or peculiarities relating to one's own birth. These could arise from no conscious memory or phantasy formation, because they could not be known previously by anyone."

"Art is life's dream interpretation."

"What we achieve inwardly will change our outer reality."